[gentoo-dev] autoreconf -i or -s ?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Hi,
Just another consult-post just to see the opinion of the developers (and of 
the users who know what to say :) ).

There are a few packages which, under some strange autotools combinations 
which not always are reproducible, suffer from an error like

Putting files in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR, `autotools'.
configure.in: required file `autotools/mkinstalldirs' not found
autoreconf-2.59: automake failed with exit status: 1

This is took by bug #89619 [1], but it's not the only case I was told of. I 
also suffered from one of them in an occasion.

The usual solution is to pass -a switch to automake or -i switch to 
autoreconf.

The question I'm asking here is: should we use -i or -s? For who doesn't know, 
-i options copies the missing autotools standard files from the system copy, 
-s symlinks them. Automake defaults to symlinking them with -a, and uses -ac 
to copy them.

This is just a little thing, but having a "right way" to do it could be 
better. Symlinking is faster, copy is usually needed to make distributable 
source tarballs.

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89619
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Gentoo Developer (Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Gentoo/AMD64)

http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/